The Case of the Dummy MRP Order

Case Date: June 2026

How loss of ownership keeps impacting the business

Context

Central Indiana manufacturer. Raw materials have a 30-day shelf life. When a customer hasn't committed to a final quantity yet, the customer service manager enters a placeholder "dummy" order in the MRP system to hold the slot.

What keeps happening

When the CSM is out, someone else steps in and enters a second order, not knowing the dummy already exists. Both orders get processed. Material gets ordered against phantom demand. The 30-day clock starts ticking on inventory that was never really needed.

The downstream cost

Expiring material. Multiple high-salary meetings to figure out what to do with it. Production schedules shuffled to burn it into lower-value products before it goes bad. All hands, all quarters, same fire.

What the company has tried

Retrained the team three times. Framed it as a people issue; someone's not following the process. But the fire keeps coming back, and by now no one owns it.

How I'd approach it

Interview the stakeholders: CSM, backup coverage, production planning, purchasing. Map the process as it actually runs, not as the SOP describes it. The duplicate order isn't the failure, it's the symptom. The failure is that the MRP system has no way to flag "we already have a placeholder for this customer in the last X days."

Then work with IT to build that flag. Not more training. A system that makes the mistake harder to make and a path to a system that grows and lasts.

Why it matters

This is the pattern: when a recurring cost gets framed as a people issue, the fix is always more training. When it gets framed as a process issue, the fix is durable. One of those keeps the meeting on the calendar. The other takes it off.